Month: January 2013

Christopher Benfey considers our complicated relationship to wolves:

I have learned a great deal about the systematic extermination of wolves from a beautiful and heartbreaking book called The Lost Wolves of Japan by the environmental historian Brett Walker, who seeks “to explain why one species—our species, Homo sapiens—has worked so tirelessly to destroy another.” Walker points out that before Japan began its rapid modernization during the last quarter of the nineteenth century—under pressure from American forces and with the help of American experts, many of whom came from New England—wolves were considered sacred: “Grain farmers worshiped wolves at shrines, beseeching this elusive canine to protect their crops from the sharp hooves and voracious appetites of wild boars and deer.”

Beef was considered the proper staple of a modern nation, however. With the introduction of so-called “industrial farms” for breeding horses and cattle, especially in the northern island of Hokkaido, wolves were re-categorized as evil predators, and Japan created “a culture of wolf hatred.” So efficient were the Japanese, with guns and traps and strychnine, that the last Japanese wolf was killed, near the beautiful ancient capital of Nara, in 1905, the same year in which the upstart nation won the Russo-Japanese War and took its place among the beef-eating world powers.

(Photo by Flickr user tambako.)

Morgan Meis complicates what it means to be a Luddite:

The influential and recently deceased historian, Eric Hobsbawm, wrote a famous article in 1952 called, “The Machine Breakers.” In the article Hobsbawm explained that, while it may have been futile in one sense, the Luddite rebellion was an important episode in the early history of organized labor and attempts to improve the lot of the working class. Hobsbawm coined the phrase “collective bargaining by riot,” as a concise and memorable summing up of how he thinks we ought to think about the Luddites. Hobsbawm pointed out that machine wrecking actually did lead, in many instances, to wage increases and other concessions from employers and the government. In none of these cases, Hobsbawm argues, “was there any question of hostility to machines as such. Wrecking was simply a technique of trade unionism in the period before, and during the early phases of, the industrial revolution.”

The Luddites, then, were pragmatists. They were proto-trade unionists. They were fighting for their rights and their livelihoods in the only way that was available at the time. Their cause was not futile; Luddites were not machine-obsessed lunatics trying to halt the march of history.

Alice Gregory pans Carlin Flora’s new book, Friendfluence, pejoratively labeling it an example of “laboratory-approved self-help” that misses most of what is actually fascinating about friendship:

“Solid friendships can help you shed pounds, sleep better, stop smoking, and even survive a major illness,” Flora writes, and from the work of psychiatrists, evolutionary biologists, and anthropologists, she draws self-evident conclusions: companionship makes us happy, children who are valued amongst their peers do better in life, college students send more e-mails to their close friends than their acquaintances, friendships provide opportunities for storytelling. The banality of these conclusions provides a taste of the banality of this book. It is difficult, but apparently not impossible, to finish a 240-page nonfiction book and learn practically nothing.

Tim Parks makes a paradoxical case for “grammar police” – rules make literary innovation possible:

[N]obody requires the existence of a standard and a general pressure to conform more than the person who wishes to assume a position outside it. It is essential for the creative writer that there be, or be perceived to be, a usual way of saying things, if a new or unusual way is to stand out and to provoke some excitement. So when D. H. Lawrence in Women in Love writes of Gudrun’s insomnia after first making love to Gerald that she was “destroyed into perfect consciousness,” he needs the reader to sense at once that this is syntactically anomalous; a person can be “transformed into,” “turned into,” “changed into” but not “destroyed into.” The syntactical shock underlines Lawrence’s unconventional view of consciousness as a negative rather than positive state, which again is emphasized by the unexpected use of the word “perfect,” rather than a more immediately understandable and neutral “intense.”

Karen Swallow Prior reframes the debate, arguing that the novel always has been tied to unbelief:

The novel was the outgrowth of the passing of the age of belief into the age of unbelief. It is the literary form that developed as an expression of the modern subject: the record of individual, particular and progressive experience. In both form and content, the novel embodies the rise of the individual, and with that, the individual’s quest for identity – for with the detachment from the body religious comes the loss of just about everything else that forms an identity.

Thus the novel is the literary form that embodies the modern condition, a condition that can include belief, but is not, broadly speaking, defined by it. So while there may have been novels of belief, the Novel has always been about unbelief – even despite the fact that its earliest authors (Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding) were, interestingly enough, themselves committed believers.

David Griffith ponders the alternatives:

[P]erhaps we should look to literary nonfiction—personal essay and memoir. I am drawn to the genre because it allows for spiritual self-evaluation in a way that fiction performs either at a remove, or in a secret deeply personal way, possibly known only by the author.

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Danny Robins lauds the prison-reform campaign of the late, great country singer, Johnny Cash, including the many unpaid concerts he played for inmates:

He played his first prison concert in 1957 at the Huntsville State Prison in Texas. Many more followed.The unique energy of these appearances was captured in 1968 on the At Folsom Prison recording. The album cemented Cash’s outlaw image and reignited his career, which had been floundering in the mid-60s as he battled drug addiction.

Columbia Records, which had only reluctantly agreed to Cash’s request to record at the prison and then half-heartedly marketed the release, was taken aback. But Cash had undeniably caught the public mood.

(Video: Johnny Cash sings “San Quentin” to inmates at San Quentin State Prison in CA)

Reflecting on recent church-state legal disputes in Europe and America, Peter Berger offers a hypothesis as to their cause:

The new American secularism is in defense of the sexual revolution. Since the 1960s there has indeed been a sexual revolution in America. It has been very successful in changing the mores and the law. It should not be surprising that many people, especially younger ones, enjoy the new libidinous benefits of this revolution. Whether one approves or deplores the new sexual culture, it seems unlikely to be reversed. Yet Christian churches (notably the Catholic and Evangelical ones) are in the forefront of those who do want to reverse the libertine victory. Its beneficiaries are haunted by the nightmare of being forced into chastity belts by an all too holy alliance of clerics and conservative politicians. No wonder they are hostile!

Walter Russell Mead disagrees, arguing that for much of Western history “the church and the people agreed more than they disagreed” about basic issues of public morality, and the breakdown of this consensus has complicated our political life in ways Berger misses:

In a democratic society, laws about marriage reflect the majority’s views. A century ago, this wasn’t a problem because the majority of individuals, as well as churches, agreed about what marriage was. Today, no such consensus exists.

Where we disagree with Berger, then, is that the conflict over public morality isn’t a cage match between a unified Christian body and a unified secular movement. Society is becoming so diverse that any civil law on marriage will coincide with fewer people’s beliefs about what the law should be. This breakdown of cultural consensus is going to haunt American jurisprudence and political discourse for the foreseeable future.